history essay

The cold war between USA and soviet union

Published: 23, March 2015

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The Cold War was fought between the United States of America and the Soviet Union. According to Jackson Spielvogel, author of Western Civilization and an associate professor emeritus of history at The Pennsylvania State University, ". . . even before the last battles had been fought, the United States and the Soviet Union had arrived at different visions of the postwar European world. No sooner had the war ended than their differences gave rise to a new and potentially even more devastating conflict known as the Cold War." The affects of the World War had left Europe up for grabs in who would control how the country would reestablish itself. This caused an argument between the United States and the Soviets. Both these powers had different outlooks on how it should be handled which soon led to the Cold War. The war was primarily fought over the Communism issue in Europe.

Containment is referred to as the United States attempts to stop or limit the Soviets expansion. The Soviets were pushing their Communism upon the weaker, smaller countries. So the United States took it upon them selves to put an end to this before it escalated into something horrible. It was either contain the Soviet Union or let them overtake Europe.

The role of the Truman Doctrine was to help provide funds to countries that were trying to resist the corruption while rebuilding their own lands and government. According to McCauley, writer of The Origins of the Cold War, "President Truman said, 'I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.'" The overall outcome for the Truman Doctrine was to provide money to countries that said they were being threatened by the Communist to become like them.

The role of the Marshal Plan was like that of an European Recovery Program. According to McCauley, "The Marshal Plan had a political and an economic goal. Its political goal was to contain communism; its economic aim was to bring prosperity to Europe and thereby to provide export markets for the US economy."

One of the most influential or even scariest moments of the Cold War was the Cuban Missile Crisis. During 1959, Fidel Castro took over Cuba by overthrowing their dictator Fulgencio Batista, and he then established a Soviet-supported base. The United State attempted to come in and overthrow Castro in the Bay of Pigs, but it ended in total failure. The following year the Soviet Union decided to place nuclear missiles in Cuba. The United States, of course, did not want any kind of nuclear missiles that close to the homeland. An agreement came between the two powers when a fleet of American ships blockaded the Soviet's nuclear missile fleet from reaching Cuba. However, the Americans had a nuclear missile base in Turkey so the Soviets wanted to have one near American soil. Within the blockade, the two agreed to that if the Americans would not invade Cuba then the Soviets would turn around the fleet that carried the nuclear missiles. This resulted without a nuclear war.

The Cold War finally came to an end or did it? Spielvogel said, "The accession of Mikhail Gorbacev to power in the Soviet Union in 1985 eventually brought a dramatic end to the Cold War." Gorbachev had great plans of 'New Thinking'. One thing he did was to establish the INF treaty. This treaty was eliminate the intermediate-range nuclear weapons. Both sides had finical problems because of their armed race that they had been having for years. Thanks to this agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Cold War finally came to an end in 1991. Not saying that this was the main treaty that ended the entire war, but it was one step closer that led to the end of the Cold War.

In your opinion, could the Cold War have been avoided? In my opinion, I think that it was unavoidable because if the United States would have just set back and let the Soviet Union take control over all of Europe we would have a totally different world. Communism was one of the main reasons why the United States took it on them selves to stop the Soviet Union. The United States knew what they were doing overall, and they understood that it needed to be done. This is not saying that it was taken in account without some things that could have been dealt with differently, but I think that the United States did what they needed to do to better the entire world.

Work Cited

McCauley, Martin. "The Origins of the Cold War." Published in the United States of

America by Longman Inc., New York. 1983.

Spielvogel, Jackson. "Western Civilization." Seventh Edition. Published in the United

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